Edinburgh · Google & Microsoft Ads
Freelance PPC
consultant.
Not an agency.
I’m Michael Veal. I run Google and Microsoft Ads for a small number of ecommerce and B2B businesses. Before going freelance I owned a £6m annual budget across five regions at G Adventures. You get that directly, with nobody in between.
Brands I’ve worked with, in house and freelance
- Swole Panda
- Photo ID Card People
- G Adventures
- Abercrombie & Kent
- Workpro
- Smart Cleaning UK
- Oxford Online Pharmacy
- Edge45
- Webleaf
Most PPC problems are boring ones
In ten years of looking at other people’s accounts, I’ve almost never found the problem to be a clever one. It’s usually conversion tracking that quietly broke in March. A product feed with half the titles truncated. Budget sitting in a campaign that stopped working eighteen months ago because nobody had a reason to look.
Agencies aren’t built to catch that. They’re built to be busy, because the retainer has to look full. So you get monthly decks, a rotating account manager, and a strategist you met once during the pitch.
I work the other way round. I keep the client list small on purpose and I do the work myself. I’d rather send you a short message saying nothing needs changing this week than invent something to justify the invoice.
Paid media, run properly
Search, Shopping, Performance Max
Structure, bidding, budgets, negatives and creative, reviewed every week rather than every quarter. Demand Gen and YouTube where they earn it.
The channel everyone neglects
Usually the cheapest incremental revenue in the account and usually ignored. I run it as its own channel, not a copy and paste of Google.
Shopping feeds and Merchant Center
Diagnostics, feed rules, titles and attributes, multi-country and multi-currency. For most ecommerce accounts the feed moves the number more than the bidding does.
Tracking that tells the truth
GA4, Tag Manager, conversion goals, offline and CRM imports. If the data going in is wrong then every decision after it is wrong, so this gets checked first.
Account audits
A properly detailed review of what’s working, what’s wasting money and what I’d do in your position. Useful before you hire anyone, including me.
Meta, TikTok and LinkedIn
Where they earn their place alongside search. I’ll tell you honestly if I don’t think they will.
Numbers, with the window
they were measured over
All four are covered in more detail in the case studies.
European beauty brand, nine markets
Around EUR 85k a month in Google Ads across nine European markets. Revenue went from EUR 2.01m to EUR 3.70m in the first seven months of the year against the same seven months of 2025. Return on ad spend improved at the same time.
The UK market is the one I’m most pleased with: revenue up 21% on 18% less media spend, ROAS from 3.79x to 5.58x. I took the account over from the incumbent agency in November 2025.
Named on request, and they’re happy to take a reference call.
UK ecommerce, printed ID cards and badges
A long-running account where the job wasn’t reinvention, it was compounding. More conversions at a lower cost per acquisition over a full twelve months, which is the timescale that matters when a business is planning its year.
Google Ads at account level, segmented by month, so seasonality is included rather than cropped out.
UK professional training provider
I took this one over spending £113,000 a month and reporting, quite literally, no revenue at all. Conversion value ran at between £0 and £5 a month for the six months before I arrived, while spend climbed from £42k to £74k. The tracking had broken and nobody had looked.
So the first job was measurement, not media: one conversion action became three, including proper ecommerce transactions. By March 2022 the account was recording £160,972 of tracked revenue on £77,242 of spend, a 2.08x return against a baseline where return couldn’t be worked out at all.
The part I’m happiest about is that it held. A year after I handed it back, with no involvement from me, it was still running above £167,000 a month.
UK B2B software company
Paid search leads doubled, 24 against 12, at £472 a lead against £577. More importantly the leads reaching opportunity or customer stage went from 2 to 13, because we measured against the CRM rather than against form fills.
Measured in the client’s HubSpot on any-touch paid search, not on Google Ads conversions. Low volume and high value, which is how most B2B accounts really behave.
What clients have said
He’s proactive, transparent, and genuinely cares about delivering results. What stands out is how easy Michael is to work with. He’s always available to explain strategy, dig into the data, and offer ideas that align with our wider goals.Oliver SlackeCo-Founder, Swole Panda
His expertise and attention to detail transformed our Ads. He provided weekly updates, clear insights, actionable strategies, and was incredibly responsive to any questions.Sal and LouFlutterby
Michael has been a pleasure to work with thus far, and really knows what he is doing in his domain. His communication, kind and charming approach to paid media is exactly what us and our clients need.Sean BryantAgency partner
Three things that are different
You get me
No account managers, no juniors learning on your budget, no work quietly passed to a partner overseas. The person who wrote your strategy is the person in the account on a Tuesday morning.
Fewer meetings
I cap my calls deliberately. You get clear written reporting and a fast reply when you need one. I won’t book a standing monthly call just so we both have something in the diary.
A flat monthly fee
Agreed up front, never a percentage of your ad spend. I should be paid for improving the account, not for talking you into spending more on it.
When you shouldn’t hire me
Very small budgets
Below roughly £1,000 a month in ad spend, a management fee starts eating the thing it’s supposed to improve. I’ll say so rather than take the work.
You want someone in the building
If what you need is a marketing manager sitting with your team every day, a freelance consultant is the wrong shape. Hire properly instead.
You want everything
I do paid media. Not SEO, web design or content. I’d rather point you at someone good than pretend otherwise.
Where the experience comes from
At G Adventures I was Global Manager for Digital Marketing for nearly six years. I owned a £6m+ annual Google and Bing budget across five regions, led two specialists in the UK and Canada, and grew the CRM database 50% year on year. That’s where I learned what happens to a big account when the tracking is wrong, and how much money sits in the difference.
Before that I was Head of PPC at TSMS, running paid search across a digital agency’s healthcare, travel, FMCG and SaaS clients. Agency work teaches you to move quickly across very different accounts, which is still useful.
Since 2022 I’ve run Roam Digital from Edinburgh, working directly with UK and European ecommerce and lead generation businesses. I also deliver paid media on a white label basis for two UK agencies. Certified in Google Ads, Microsoft Ads and Meta Ads, and working across GA4, Tag Manager, Merchant Center, Shopify, HubSpot and Looker Studio.
The things people ask first
What does a freelance PPC consultant actually do?
The same job an agency does, without the layer of people between you and the work. I plan the strategy, build and restructure the campaigns, manage bidding and budgets, write and test the ads, fix the tracking, watch the search terms and tell you what the numbers mean in plain English.
The practical difference is accountability. There’s one name on the account, so when something goes wrong there’s no question about whose job it was.
What does it cost?
A fixed monthly fee, agreed before we start, based on the scope of the work rather than on how much you spend. Ad spend and management fee are separate things and tying them together creates a bad incentive.
Tell me roughly what you’re spending and what you want the account to do, and I’ll give you a straight number. One-off audits are quoted separately.
Do you only work with clients in Edinburgh?
No. I’m based in Edinburgh and happy to meet people in person here, but the work is remote and always has been. My clients are spread across the UK and Europe, and one runs in nine countries and four languages. There’s a separate page for Edinburgh businesses.
What size of ad budget do you work with?
Current accounts range from roughly £1,000 a month up to around £100,000 a month, so there’s a fair amount of room. What matters more than the number is whether there’s enough data in the account for decisions to be based on something other than a hunch.
If your budget is genuinely too small for the fee to make sense, I’ll say so rather than take it.
Am I locked into a long contract?
No. Rolling monthly, 30 days notice either side. Long contracts exist to stop clients leaving when the work isn’t good enough, which isn’t a problem I want to solve that way.
I’d ask for three months before you judge it though, because that’s roughly how long structural changes take to show up properly in the data.
Do I keep ownership of my accounts?
Always. Your Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, Merchant Center and analytics accounts stay in your name with you as the owner, and I work inside them with access granted to me. If we ever stop working together you keep everything, including the history.
How quickly can you start?
Usually within a week or two, depending on where I am against my client ceiling. If I don’t have room I’ll tell you straight away rather than take the work and stretch myself thin over it.
Get in touch
Send me your account and I’ll tell you what I see
No pitch deck, no discovery call sequence. Tell me what you’re running and what’s bothering you about it, and I’ll come back with an honest read on whether I can help and what it would cost.
- michael@roamdigital.co.uk
- Phone
- +44 7446 855769
- Based in
- Edinburgh, Scotland
- linkedin.com/in/michael-veal